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Comment by dman | Hacker News Reader

AMD has much cheaper points of entry to ECC.

yeah I was noticing this, AMD is much more ECC friendly whereas Intel segments their markets hard by arbitrarily disallowing ECC platform use on common consumer (read: not-Xeon) CPUs. Unfortunately AMD is still quite a bit slower than Intel these days, but if you are doing work that is GPU rather than CPU intensive it might not matter.

> disallowing ECC platform use on common consumer (read: not-Xeon) CPUs

this hasn't really been true since Haswell. Now even low-end Celerons and Pentiums support it.

One may suspect that some Celeron/Pentium/i3 SKUs support ECC just so that Intel doesn't have to manage low-volume very-low-end E3 SKUs. And then you run into the fact that the cheapest server motherboard is double the price of a cheap desktop one.

From what I can tell, some Celeron/Pentium/i3 SKUs support it because AMD was killing Intel in certain NAS applications thanks to the fact that their low-end chips had ECC.

Even then, not all MBs support it... Most of the higher end Asus boards do, with AMD CPUs. The difference in power usage is pretty significant... Going from an FX-8350 to an i7-4790K was a significant power/heat improvement, for a faster CPU. The i3-5010U in my htpc is pretty awesome for what it does as well.

It really depends on the tasks if you NEED it... I wouldn't to a byo nas ever again... I would suggest that a lot of workloads don't need it.

That said, the additional cost should be nominal at this point, and I don't quite get why it isn't standard. It's like the coprocessors in the early 90's eventually became a critical integrated piece.

Core i3's have ECC support.

Yes, but many of the consumer grade motherboards do not. (you have to step up to a xeon in most cases)

Low end server/workstation motherboards are quite cheap and plentiful nowadays. Even some of the low-end Pentiums have ECC support so there is little reason not to.

Any examples of a cheap Intel motherboard that supports ECC?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DE...

There seems to be plenty of options in the sub-$200 range.

I don't believe the Core i3's have ECC support. See [1]. My understanding is that the i3's (and i5's and i7's) differ from Xeons in that the do not have ECC support.

[1] https://communities.intel.com/message/282073

There are a lot of i3's with ECC support, even some Pentiums, Celerons and Atoms have ECC support. I see them used often in cheap NAS builds, seems just that specific one in your link didn't have it, not i3's in general.

http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced?s=t&ECCMemory=true

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